Feminist Experiences Research Articles

Feminismo y socialismo en los albores del xx en Colombia

This article addresses the problematic relationship between feminism and socialism, based on four experiences of social struggle developed in the first decades of the 20th century in Colombia. From these cases, the forms of relationship between feminist and socialist expressions of the time are explored, as well as the existence of popular feminism at the dawn of the 20th century and its characteristics. As main findings, advances and limitations in the relationship between feminism and socialism in terms of organization and program are identified; in turn, the existence of liberal and popular feminist experiences at this time is verified, with characteristic subjects, demands and repertoires, which supposes the questioning of the historical account of the waves of feminism.

Feminist Experiences: Foucauldian and Phenomenological Investigations, by Johanna Oksala (Book Review Article)

Review of Oksala's 2016 Feminist Experiences: Foucauldian and Phenomenological Investigations.

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

A lone ranger: My journey towards becoming a feminist geographer in Nairobi, Kenya

Very few Kenyan universities offer modules on Gender or Feminism in their courses. Women are largely under-represented and very few hold senior positions. Due to the few numbers of female faculty, mentorship for young female scholars is lacking. Feminist writing by Female Kenyan geographers in professional geography journals is limited. Collective action among female geography faculty is also largely absent. This is largely due to the lack of feminist advocacy and policies in the universities. My journey to becoming a feminist geographer has received little or no support from the university. I have taken personal initiatives to link up with local and transnational gender associations in order to get insights on current feminist scholarship issues. My lived feminist experience and observations of the struggles of ordinary women in everyday livelihood negotiation have been my main motivation for continuing to do feminist work. Thus, my feminist work has concentrated on women in marginal economic informality. This paper presents my journey as a feminist geographer. It begins with a discussion on the state of feminist geography in three universities in Kenya namely, University of Nairobi, Kenyatta University and Egerton University. This is followed by a presentation of my journey toward becoming a feminist geographer in the absence of a supportive infrastructure. My journey has been inspired by my lived experience. The paper concludes with a call for a concerted effort for feminist advocacy in Kenyan Geography departments.

Feminist experiences: a response to Smaranda Aldea and Amy Allen

Feminist experiences: a response to Smaranda Aldea and Amy Allen

Feminism as critique: comments on Johanna Oksala’s feminist experiences

Feminism as critique: comments on Johanna Oksala’s feminist experiences

Feminist Experiences of ‘Studying Up’: Encounters with International Institutions

This article makes the case for feminist IR to build knowledge of international institutions. It emerges from a roundtable titled ‘Challenges and Opportunities for Feminist IR: Researching Gendered Institutions’ which took place at the International Studies Association Annual Convention in Baltimore in 2017. Here, we engage in self-reflexivity, drawing on our conversation to consider what it means for feminist scholars to ‘study up’. We argue that feminist IR conceptions of narratives and the everyday make a valuable contribution to feminist institutionalist understandings of the formal and informal. We also draw attention to the value of postcolonial approaches and multi-site analyses of international institutions for creating a counter-narrative to hegemonic accounts emerging from both the institutions themselves, and scholars studying them without a critical feminist perspective. In so doing, we draw attention to the salience of considering not just what we study as feminist International Relations scholars but how we study it.

Overleveringer – kropslige erfaringer på tværs af tid

The article “Handing on – Bodily Experiences Across Time” investigates how body and time are significant elements in the sculptural practices of the Danish artist Kirsten Justesen (b. 1943). The article presents a methodical approach to Justesen through the embroidered body-map made by the Danish artist Gudrun Hasle (b. 1979). The body-map is a “handover” of Justesen’s body; scars, marks of life and the body as a tool in works of body-art. It sets a different focus than that of a linear and chronological structured storytelling: it becomes sensual and bodily in an aesthetic processing of political and feminist experiences. The article finds its theoretical grounds in a concept of feminism’s timing and queer temporalities, and articulates how knowledge production and the raising of a feminist consciousness can be handed over through a bodily approach. Questioning the thinking of “feminism” in waves and generations, the article discusses how both artists relate and articulate a storytelling about women’s and art history, situated from the common grounds of being “woman”, “artist” and “pregnant”, with all the privileges and challenges that Justesen and Hasle each have had. The main focus of the article lies in an analysis of Justesen’s work CIRCUMSTANCES (1969-) and how it can be mapped out; how time and body in space can be connected over and across time as a quality within CIRCUMSTANCES, as well as an issue which continually challenges the concept of the “work of art” as an closed entity. Justesen’s use of the body as a tool and sculptural material linked to the political circumstances of the 1970’s paved the way for a different viewpoint and representation of the female body. As Hasle builds on these bodily and gendered experiences in her own practice as an artist and in her exhibition THOSE BEFORE ME, she sets new grounds for the art historical narratives to be told from.

The politics of erased migrations: Expanding a relational, intersectional sociology of Latinx gender and migration

AbstractSociologists of gender and Latina/o migration and Chicana feminist scholars in Chicana/o Studies have made extensive interventions in the academic project of recovering the experiences of women in migration studies across disciplines. I consider these contributions and advocate for an interdisciplinary research agenda that continues expanding relational scholarship by developing the concept of the politics of erased migrations, an analytical tool to theorize why and how the embodied experiences of Latinas are marginalized and misrepresented in academic research. Latinas experience various physical and symbolic migrations—across and within national borders, social and political contexts, identities, academic disciplines, methodologies, and social movements. Yet Latina feminist experiences, knowledge, and political movement largely remain at the margins of these borders. Through a review of prominent research on gender and migration centered on heteronormativity, reproduction, and the nation‐state, I demonstrate the possibilities of the politics of erased migration as a theoretical intervention in expanding a relational, intersectional sociology of Latinx gender and migration. This paper carries implications for shifting the field of Latinx gender and migration from a focus on current oppressive conditions to one that also imagines new avenues for social justice and alternative social worlds.

We take the red pill, we confront the DickTrix: online feminist activism and the augmentation of gendered realities in South Korea

In recent years, the internet in South Korea has become a battleground for unprecedented gender wars. This was intensified by the emergence of Megalia, an online feminist group that was started in 2015 as a response to the misogynistic culture and discourses in male-dominated online communities. This article explores the emergence of a new form of digital feminist activism as a process through which gendered realities and feminist experiences are simultaneously augmented. We argue that female online users in Korea, by taking the online seriously as a focal site in which offline realities are not simply extended or revoked but augmented through and through, could gain a critical perspective on gender relations via the activism of fun.

When Female Feminists Falling in Love: Ideology, Media, and Practices

<p>Falling in love is a universal experience that cannot be bounded by racial, religious, ethnic, even ideological barriers. The experiences of falling in love and be in the relationships are also faced by female feminists. In the experiences of falling in love, female feminists often confront with tension between their consciousness in holding feminist ideology and their collective experiences influenced by patriarchal culture. Therefore, they have to compromise and negotiate in the relationship. This paper aims to explain contemplative experiences of female feminists who are falling in love in the patriarchal culture in the three areas of analysis: feminist thoughts which are build their consideration and consciousness, the influences of patriarchal media, and practices in the love relationship in everyday lives. This study is descriptive-qualitative using in-depth interview as a method toward female feminists from diverse background in Yogyakarta, Surabaya, and Jombang. The results are the concept of love from female feminists cannot be separated from the existence of their partners, the experiences and the reproduction of media about the concept of love, as well as the practices of female feminists’ relationships, which already creating the concept of love before entering relationships.</p>

Paradoxes of the self: the autobiographical construction of the subject in the Italian Communist Party and in Italian neo-feminism

This article compares the autobiographical practices used by the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) in the aftermath of the Second World War with those developed by Italian neo-feminism from the late 1960s onwards. The former involved a repeated injunction for activists to write about and express themselves upon joining the party, in what amounted to self-criticism. The latter, meanwhile, took shape as a result of self-consciousness exercises practised by feminist groups in various cities across Italy. The terms of comparison of this article aim to describe what changed and what remained the same in the technologies used to produce the political self within the Italian Left in the twentieth century, beginning from its split in the 1960s. In this context, the paper reveals that the communist and feminist experiences were supported by the same discursive mechanism, which hinged on a paradoxical enunciation of the self. Communist activists and feminists thus faced the same difficulty in political self-expression, which was resolved in two different ways, both equally unsatisfactory. In conclusion, examining the communist autobiographical injunction allows a radical critical reappraisal of the idea that the use of the first person and the political affirmation of subjectivity are determining features exclusively bound to the feminist experience.

Feminist birds of passage: Feminist and migrant becomings of Latin American women in Spain

This article focuses on the articulations of migration and gender, from the vantage point of women whose feminist experiences have been both enriched and challenged by migration and vice versa. It presents the results of a qualitative research study of five Latin American women who migrated to Barcelona and felt close to feminisms. The author draws on feminist and postcolonial approaches to migration studies that highlight the active role women play in migratory processes as well as how intersectional variables of ethnic origin, socioeconomic class, education and family contexts are articulated, configuring different power relations and resources in specific sociohistorical contexts. The results challenge widespread stereotypes about migrant women by revealing a rich diversity of profiles, motivations and migratory pathways, as well as how informants’ experiences of social activism across national borders have transformed their subject formation processes and re-positioned them as active subjects of political action.

Book Review: Cross-Cultural Interviewing: Feminist Experiences and Reflections

Book Review: Cross-Cultural Interviewing: Feminist Experiences and Reflections

Construyendo una pedagogía de la sororidad desde la Casa Cultural Tejiendo Sororidades de Cali (Colombia)

Este artículo caracteriza el trabajo de una organización feminista de Cali, la Casa Cultural Tejiendo Sororidades (CCTS) en la etapa del 2005 al 2013. Con la sistematización de la experiencia se identificó la cultura de la sororidad de la CCTS, su pedagogía y su incidencia en las mujeres participantes de la Comuna 18. A través de la implementación de esta cultura de la sororidad la organización ha creado espacios propios para ellas y mejorado su autoestima, propiciando el desarrollo de habilidades y conocimientos desde el enfoque de género, fomentando la elaboración de un discurso con conciencia crítica de género, afirmando liderazgos entrañables que transforman relaciones de género en la vida de las participantes. El artículo devela las rutas que se han intentado, los referentes teóricos y logros de una pedagogía de la sororidad en este contexto. El modelo de sistematización utilizado implicó el desarrollo de tres dimensiones interdependientes: Reconstrucción de la experiencia de la sororidad, con sus principales actores, identificando referentes teóricos. Interpretación de su lógica interna y aprendizajes significativos. Potenciación de la experiencia. Se referencia una experiencia feminista en la ciudad de Cali, que se constituye en un caso de política de lugar de mujeres populares en resistencia a una cultura dominante como lo es el patriarcado.

Hacia una crítica feminista de la sociedad red: más allá de la revolución de la audiencia creativa

The relation between discourse and power involves gender relations and it should be addressed in the field of communications, since this is the arena where discourses mainly flow and, therefore, wherepowerrelationsarerepresented.Ascheme I consider capable of deconstruction from a feminist critical awareness. This article assumes situated knowledge (Haraway, 1995; Castaneda Salgado, 2008) as the appropriate epistemological choice for a critical investigation, assuming feminist experience as a field of intersection between academic research and militancy. Taking the informational society (Castells, 2000) as the current paradigm of social organization and using concepts such as the network society and mass self-communication (Castells, 2009), in this article, I intend to question what are the limits of the current communicational technological changes. Hoping to discuss the plasticity of the new communications scenario and ICTs and considering, besides their potentialities, factors that are often invisible because of the enthusiasm provoked by a possible democratization of media, such as reproduction of sexist violence and heteropatriarchy disciplinary discourses.

A Feminist Translates

The study of three Golden Age plays with an all-female group of undergraduate students led to class discussions about contemporary everyday violence against women. Those discussions prompted these reflections of the role of teaching and translating as performative and potentially transformative acts. In this respect, the university classroom is studied as the site for understanding how the subject matter of Spanish Golden Age plays lives and how we become its translators. Based on present-day stories of female and feminist experience, the essay explores questions of intellectual and ideological subjectivity in translation and the ways in which a feminist being-in-the-work might operate as the site from which the target text is approached and to which it might be drawn. Working with the consciousness of the mobilising of subject position with a historical context, the essay then explores the writing, in the past and present, of the female subject in La vengadora de las mujeres by Lope de Vega and Los empeños de una casa by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Matter, Freedom and the Future: Reframing Feminist Theologies through an Ecological Materialist Lens1

An ecological focus is not simply an additional perspective to add to a multidimensional approach to feminist theologies. Ecological thinking requires a fundamental shift of perspective, so that the focus of feminism, traditionally a human focus, is rethought within the frame of the materiality that constitutes not only humans but Earth and cosmos. As a way of situating feminist theological discourses and experiences ecologically, this article focuses on a shared materiality as a basis for reframing human being, dwelling, agency and labour, in terms of co-being, habitat, co-agency and more-than-human labour. This reframing implies a rethinking of human freedom that has implications for how we engage with feminist theologies in relation to the future of Earth and humankind.

‘That women’s writing thing you do’ Reflections on Early-Career Decision Making

This article takes its title from an experience in a liminal moment after completing a PhD but not yet finding a comfortable academic home to offer reflections based on what to contemplate when making decisions after the PhD. It considers how to find spaces to work in which there is the possibility for congruency between what we do, what we believe in and the realities of needing to earn a living. These reflections and experiences are read through the theoretical lens of work on gendered silences and the relationships of our gendered selves to knowledge and research. The article interweaves narratives of early-career decisions, gendered and feminist experiences of cultural studies with the relationships between me and my research project.

Rethinking representation: negotiating positionality, power and space in the field

The article addresses the question of representation by highlighting some of the methodological challenges I encountered in the field during a study on women's experiences of empowerment and change in northern Pakistan. I trace positionality of a researcher within the wider context of reflexivity, which is important for feminist and other research on gender. I argue that engaging with my own identity during the fieldwork and the writing stages allowed me to gain an in-depth understanding of the intimacies of the participants' worlds and assisted me in drawing an intricate interpretation of empowerment from their narratives in their unique social situation. It was also useful to maintain balance between the responsibilities associated with being a researcher and a member of the community returning home. Through the comparison of my life history with the women informants, I hope to present autoethnographic presence as an alternative way of understanding representation. The process defines positionality as a significant component of the trajectory of contemporary feminist experience and its description.